When installing electronic equipment such as communication equipment and a storage device, cabinet racks that house the equipment stacked flat therein are used.
In such cabinet racks, the 19-inch racks, each of which is made to have a 19-inch width in compliant with the Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA) standard, have become a standard (referred to as the “standard rack” hereinafter). A height standard is set to a mounting unit (1 U) of electronic equipment, that is, 44.45 mm.
A variety of electronic equipment is designed in sizes that are in compliant with the standard in order to be mounted in the standard racks. A single rack houses a combination of variety of types of electronic equipment.
In particular, after a system is upgraded, sometimes additional pieces of electronic equipment are mounted in the racks because of an increase in the amount of data to be handled or expansion of business operations. Additional mounting of electronic equipment in the racks often takes time and efforts since such work is manually performed. In order to deal with a combination of different types of electronic equipment, L-shaped mounting supports are used to mount the electronic equipment.
FIG. 10 is a schematic diagram illustrating an interior of a rack 10 seen from the front side, indicating a front view of the rack 10 having a rectangular parallelepiped shape. FIG. 11 illustrates an operation in which a piece of electronic equipment is mounted. The rack 10 includes a top plate 8, a base plate 7 that constitute part of a casing, and a total of four vertically extending rack support posts 11, two of which are disposed at the front side and the other two of which are disposed at the back side.
Each of the rack posts 11 is provided with a vertically extending equipment mount support post 13 therealong. The equipment mount support posts 13 have fixing holes 13h (tapped holes) therein for mounting pieces of electronic equipment 1. The fixing holes are arranged at predetermined intervals in accordance with the mounting unit.
As illustrated in FIG. 11, the piece of electronic equipment 1 is inserted from the front side of the rack 10, and is mounted on mounting surfaces 12l of L-shaped mounting supports 12.
FIG. 12 illustrates the rack post 11 and a portion therearound at the front side of the rack 10 seen in the −Z direction in FIG. 11. The piece of electronic equipment 1 is mounted on the mounting surfaces 12l of the L-shaped mounting supports 12. Each equipment mount support post 13 is provided with two fixing portions 13t and 13s, which are disposed perpendicularly to each other so as to form an L-shape. A fixing portion 11t of the rack post 11 and the fixing portion 13t of the equipment mount support post 13 are superposed with each other so as to cause the corresponding tapped holes to oppose each other, and are secured with a screw 4.
Each fixing portions it of the piece of electronic equipment 1, the fixing portion 13s of the corresponding equipment mount support post 13, and the fixing portion 12t that extends from the mounting surface 12l of the corresponding mounting support 12 are superposed with each other so as to cause the corresponding tapped holes to oppose each other, and are fastened with a screw 5.
FIGS. 13A to 13C illustrate a way to mount an additional piece of electronic equipment to the rack 10. A case will be described below, where an additional piece of electronic equipment 50 is mounted inside the casing of the rack 10 as an expansion of a piece of electronic equipment 41 after a system is upgraded. Referring to FIG. 13A, in a preliminary stage (step 1), the pieces of electronic equipment 41 to 45 are generally stacked in order from the bottom to the top in the rack 10 without providing empty spaces therebetween as illustrated in order to prevent the rack 10 from falling. The pieces of electronic equipment 41 to 45 are different from each other.
As illustrated in FIG. 13B, in step 2a, an empty space at an upper area of the rack 10 is utilized for mounting the additional piece of electronic equipment 50 above the piece of electronic equipment 45 positioned at the topmost location among the existing pieces of electronic equipment 41 to 45. Additional mounting work is easy when such an empty space or a separate rack is used as in the above example.
However, when it is attempted to connect the additional piece of electronic equipment 50 to the existing piece of electronic equipment 41 in such additional mounting, such an attempt may fail in some cases because of an insufficient length of a standard cable.
In addition, maintenance tools are separately provided for each of the pieces of electronic equipment 41 to 45 in order to maintain these pieces of electronic equipment. Such a maintenance tool may indicate status of a corresponding piece of electronic equipment on a display in accordance with a layout of the piece of electronic equipment. In the present example, the additional piece of electronic equipment 50 appears to be mounted immediately above the piece of electronic equipment 41 in the screen display of the maintenance tool for the piece of electronic equipment 41.
However, as described above, the other pieces of electronic equipment 42 to 45 are mounted between the piece of electronic equipment 41 and the additional piece of electronic equipment 50 in the actual rack 10. Thus, layout of the screen differs from the actual layout of the equipment. This makes maintenance management complicated.
Therefore, it is preferable to install the additional piece of electronic equipment 50 close to the existing piece of electronic equipment 41. To achieve such a configuration, operations of the existing pieces of electronic equipment are stopped, and out of the existing electronic equipment, the pieces of electronic equipment 42 to 45 are temporarily moved out of the rack 10 in order to allocate a space for additional mounting. After that, as illustrated in FIG. 13C, in step 2b, the additional piece of electronic equipment 50 is mounted above the piece of electronic equipment 41, and the other pieces of electronic equipment 42 to 45 are mounted in order above the additional piece of electronic equipment 50.
As described above, there is a step in which existing electronic equipment is temporarily moved out of a rack and connection cables and mounting supports are removed in order to change the order of the pieces of electronic equipment mounted in the rack. This means that additional mounting work takes considerable time. Furthermore, since operations of the existing electronic equipment is stopped when it is moved out of the rack, additional mounting is performed in a period of time in which business operations are not affected. Therefore, there has been a problem in that it is difficult to efficiently perform additional mounting work at a convenient time.
The following is a reference document.    [Patent Document 1] Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 08-019972